A lurid vision of history pervades Elizabeth: The Golden
Age, Shekhar Kapur’s sequel to his 1998 art-house hit Elizabeth. It’s a take
that would do Christopher “Mother Teresa Is a Fraud” Hitchens proud.

The earlier film, which made a star of Cate Blanchett as the
eponymous Virgin Queen, celebrated the triumph of bright, happy Elizabethan
Protestantism over the dark, unwholesome Catholic world of Bloody Mary. It
turns out that film’s Catholic-bashing was just a warm-up. In the sequel
everything bad, evil and corrupt in the world is the bitter fruit of religion.
And by religion, I mean the Catholic faith.

The Golden Age carefully expunges anything like actual
belief or religiosity from the minimalist piety of its heroine. Elizabeth might
kneel in a brightly lit church in decorously silent, solitary prayer, but it’s
Catholics who pray out loud, usually in spooky Latin. They read from prayer
books and clutch rosary beads. They surround themselves with ominous, robed
clerics bestowing Church sanction on all manner of sinister goings-on. Worst of
all, they have religious ideas and motivations.

If someone says something like “God has spoken to me,” it’s
a sure bet that the speaker is a Catholic whose message spells trouble for
non-Catholics. Ditto any reference to “true believers,” “God’s work,” and the
like.

In this world, God-talk is troubling Catholic behavior.
Meanwhile Protestants don’t talk to, or about, God. Their religion is little
more than a slogan for conscience, religious freedom and, of course, heroic
resistance to Catholic oppression.

“I will not punish my people for their beliefs — only for
their deeds,” says Elizabeth, conveniently forgetting that, in the last movie,
she rammed the Act of Uniformity through Parliament, outlawing the Catholic
Mass and imposing compulsory attendance at Anglican services.

In this version of history, the hosts of Catholics martyred
under Elizabeth are all traitors and conspirators. “Every Catholic in England
is a potential assassin,” Elizabeth’s advisers helpfully remind her in an early
scene. Well, then, every Catholic in England is a potential political prisoner,
too.

Historically, the film is very loosely tethered to events
from the 1580s, notably the execution of Mary Stuart (Samantha Morton) and the
defeat of the Spanish Armada of Philip II of Spain (Jordi Mollà).

Opening titles inform us that Philip — a “devout Catholic,”
in case you were wondering — has “plunged Europe into holy war,” and “only
England stands against him.” Whom this holy war is being waged against, if
“only England stands against him,” is not specified.

Presumably the reference is to resistance to Turkish
encroachment in the Mediterranean, but far be it from The Golden Age to muddy
the waters of Catholic warmongering by mentioning Muslim expansion.

In attacking England, Philip is convinced that he’s on a
mission from God. “England is enslaved to the devil,” he declares. “We must set
her free.” Certain that God is on his side as he leads his nation into a holy
war that becomes a debacle, Philip couldn’t be a darker, nuttier Hollywood
villain if his middle initial were W.

Other flirtations with topicality in this pre-election year
include assassins and conspirators praying secretly in a foreign language while
plotting their murderous attacks, and the Machiavellian Sir Francis Walsingham
(Geoffrey Rush) torturing a captured conspirator during an interrogation.

The film does go on to concede that the Spanish have other
grievances against the English besides religion, such as the queen’s tolerant
stance on English pirates like Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) raiding Spanish
ships. But it’s all a big circle: The raids are rationalized on the grounds that
Philip is Elizabeth’s enemy, and the more gold English privateers seize from
Spanish vessels, the fewer resources Philip has to wage war on England.

That the raids give Philip more justification for going to
war hardly matters, since we already know that he’s on a mission from God.

The film’s romantic intrigues are even duller than its
religio-political ones, though here at least the actors are occasionally able
to rise above their material. Not always; in some scenes even Blanchett seems
lost amid the puerility of her character’s romantic woes.

The original Elizabeth imagined the young queen carrying on
a flagrant affair with Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes),
but ended with its protagonist reinventing herself as an iconic “Virgin Queen.”
Now we find Elizabeth sustaining her celibate image and giving her singleness a
feminist gloss.

In a closing monologue, she says: “Unmarried, I have no
master; childless, I am mother to my people. God give me strength to bear this
mighty freedom.” The freedom of the single career woman!

As in the earlier film, the queen holds herself aloof from
the constant pressure to marry and produce an heir, though there is no shortage
of unsuitable suitors. There are more sparks with Raleigh, though he is more drawn
to dewy young Bess (Abbie Cornish), a favored lady-in-waiting on whom the queen
in turn dotes tenderly enough to suggest that the triangle goes all the way
around. (There were also hints of something between Elizabeth and a
lady-in-waiting in the original film.)

Elizabeth’s wonder at Raleigh’s rhapsodic account of his
arrival in the New World is about as close to a positive religious experience
as The Golden Age can muster. The ocean, Elizabeth muses, is a very “image of
eternity.” She wonders, “Do we discover the new world, or does the new world
discover us?”

When it comes to literal religiosity, though, The Golden
Age’s sensibilities are wholly unsympathetic. The climax, a weakly staged
destruction of the Spanish Armada, is a crescendo of Church-bashing imagery:
rosaries floating amid burning flotsam, inverted crucifixes sinking to the
bottom of the ocean, rows of grim clerics slinking away in defeat.

How is it possible that this orgy of anti-Catholicism has
been all but ignored by most critics? The reviews have not been good, but
critics are sticking to safe, noncommittal charges of general lameness.

The blind eye speaks volumes about the state of movie
criticism. For if the object of the film’s vitriol were any group outside
Christendom — say, if praying in Arabic were the sure sign of dangerous
fanaticism, and if a Muslim prince were making holy war on Christendom with the
blessings of all the eminent imams — would there be any shortage of critical
objections to such stereotyping?

As a lover of film criticism as well as film, I find the
reviews more depressing than the film.